Making air pollution legible
Environmental‐health data and the naturalization of the smoky season in Northern Thailand
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20153207 |
|---|---|
| Authors | M Mostafanezhad (0000-0001-9819-5245, Department of Geography & Environment University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa USA, corresponding author), Chaya Vaddhanaphuti (Department of Geography, Faculty of Social Sciences Chiang Mai University Thailand), Olivier Evrard (0000-0002-3503-6543, Institute of Research for Development (IRD) France) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 46 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 186-202 |
| Publication date | 2025-05-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0129-7619 • E-ISSN: 1467-9493 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/sjtg.12578 |
| OpenAlex | W4407559542 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 40 |
Air pollution is one of the most significant environmental threats to human health, causing over seven million premature deaths annually, with two‐thirds occurring in the Asia‐Pacific region. Each year, from February to April, northern Thailand experiences some of the world's worst air quality. The region's seasonal air pollution is primarily blamed on biomass burning from maize cultivation in the highlands and is perceived to have deteriorated over the past two decades. However, official data only partially supports these claims, while local knowledge often counters them. Drawing on ethnographic research between 2019 and 2024, we trace how the ‘smoky season’ evolved into the ‘haze crisis’ through wide‐ranging interpretations of air pollution data that facilitated the delegitimation of local environmental management practices. We argue that while air pollution is broadly recognized as a significant environmental health crisis, solutions are often framed as technocratic challenges rather than problems that require a fundamental restructuring of socioeconomic relations of production. This paper contributes to ongoing debates at the nexus of political ecology and science and technology studies (STS) on the social production of environmental‐health data and its consequences for environmental justice
Air pollution · Air quality index · Environmental justice · Environmental planning · Environmental protection · Geography · Meteorology · Nexus (standard) · Political science · Politics · Technocracy · Ecology · Energy and Environment Impacts · Environmental Justice and Health Disparities · Mining and Resource Management
Purity and Danger
Anti-Crisis
The Art of Not Being Governed
Rise into Dust
Becoming a Crisis
Haze and Health in Brunei Darussalam
Fire governance research in the tropics
Beyond slash‐and‐burn
Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
Resistance is in the air
Regional cooperation, patronage and the Asean Agreement on transboundary haze pollution
Mapping nature
Racialization and Citizenship in Thai Forest Politics
Bad Weather
Political airs
Maize boom, bust and beyond
The Politics of Forest Fires in Southeast Asia
Writing Political Forests
A political ecology of scale in urban air pollution monitoring
Hill and valley minorities in Northern Thailand
Life support
Particulate Matters
Genealogies of the Political Forest and Customary Rights in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand
Condition-Suspension
Footprints through the weather-world
Volumetric citizenship
The Crisis in Crisis
Seasons as Rhythms on the Kemi River in Finnish Lapland
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 4 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2026 (2) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 4 |